The IncluderEpisode 8People Vs. Ideas

The Includer stays alive, as an idea, thanks to last year’s Knight News Challenge. At the Las Vegas awards ceremony, I told one of the judges, maybe I got lucky? He assured me that I won because my idea was original. A billion people live within walking distance to the Internet, but there is no device for them, no Includer, so that they might read and write emails at home onto a USB flash drive, and then upload and download them once a week at an Internet cafe.

I love to workopenly. The Knight News Challenge has us publicly share our proposals. Hundreds of them are pouring in today, the last day. How many of them are original ideas? Myself, I don’t care. I have no shortage of ideas. Out of context, they are worthless. Instead, I am looking for context. Wealth is relationships. How can we build relationships? How might we include the unincluded, the people who are “out of the loop”? Isn’t that how we create wealth?

I have sifted through a few hundred of the proposals. I hope they aren’t taken down. I’ve noted the ones that I believe create context. I left comments. I wish them luck. I hope they might consider working together, working for free, alongside each other, so that our endeavors might evolve together, and we grow together as well. This is the logic of my Minciu Sodas laboratory for independent thinkers. (Write to me at ms@ms.lt !)

The News Challenge website leaves it unclear, who are the authors of the proposals? which frustrates our chances to work together. I am trying even so because tomorrow they may all be dashed, like sand at a beach.

Max Mayfield, the former director of the National Hurricane Center, and Bryan Norcross, the former hurricane analyst for CBS News, propose AEN – The Community Emergency Communications System to distribute text and video feeds by satellite whenever local communications fail.

Jeffrey Hunt, an attorney, proposes a wireless Help Network to serve the marginalized – the homeless, mentally ill, drug addicts, the poor – to encourage just-in-time, positive interaction with support teams.

The Knight News Challenge is learning how to support open culture. This year all proposals were expected to be public. The Garage provided public support. Perhaps some day soon the review process will likewise be open and public. I wish the content was all straight and out Public Domain, rather than the worst-of-breed “share alike” Creative Commons license, which is incompatible with the Public Domain.

Open culture is the interplay of open people rather than open ideas. I proposed an idea, but actually, I proposed to bring it to life. I and my team didn’t win funding to build Includers. Instead, I won the chance to blog about them at the PBS Idealab website. But what is the point of blogging about a one-year-old idea? My challenge is to link together those who care and bring to life something new. The challenge I bring to the Knight Foundation is to call for knights – for champions – for includers, rather than for ideas like the Includer.

You might also be interested in:

I also note Dost:An Open Source Citizen’s Emergency Response System: by The Center for Experimental Media Arts http://cema.srishti.ac.in

http://www.narua.org Paulo Fehlauer

Hey Andrius,
I’ve seen some of your postings, specially your paper on the Economy of Giving, and I thought you might be interested on the project that we submitted: http://moourl.com/publico
Even if we don’t get the funding, it’s something we’re working on and it would be great to have some feedback.
Best,
Paulo.

Paulo, thank you for alerting me to your important proposal: “Moitará will allow the valuing and rewarding of content production through alternative forms and social mediation in the online community. Moitará will work as a “gift quantifier”. It will be developed as a module of a CMS aimed at small communities, and also distributed as a modular interface with a public API.”

Such a catalyst for a gift economy is very much needed and I have not yet seen a good solution. We are trying Wiki gift nodes but we need something even simpler. http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?Gifts I think it’s especially important to make it an API independent of any content managment systems. Content management systems are, in my experience, not helpful for organizing online community because the latter requires more eclectic approaches.

I hope we might work together. I invite you to join John Roger’s working group Cyfranogi http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cyfranogi/ and share your thoughts there. He is interested in participatory society, community currency and also we discuss open economy. Peace, Andrius

http://heekya.com David A

Thank for the shout out to http://heekya.com . Feel free to shoot me an e-mail to discuss what we’re doing at heekya. Closed beta in the next several weeks…

http://www.kampalajuniorteam.org Fred Kayiwa

Hi Andrius
I just like your posts
they do Teach me a lot
and i get to learn what i can share with the youths here in Uganda
keep going